Kylie O'Brien reviews the first episode of Exploring China: a Culinary
Adventure (BBC Two), in which chefs Ken Hom and Ching He-Huang taste the
food of the Orient.

The heart-sinking title – Exploring China: a Culinary Adventure (BBC Two) – is surely the least-inspired name for a TV food programme since, well, Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas. At least the Beeb’s recent Hairy Bikers’ Bakeation (“life in the fat lane”) has a bonkers Britishness to it. Then again, this is of a different order of ambition, and flip just won’t do.

It also raises the question: how do you present a four-part series on China, home to a fifth of the world’s population and an extraordinarily diverse culinary history, where Beijing alone has to feed 20 million souls?

Not easily, but if anyone can do it, it’s Ken Hom, the urbane and charismatic chef, TV star and author of some 20 cookbooks (including his massively popular companion title to his Eighties BBC series, Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery). He is accompanied on this “voyage of discovery” (doesn’t anyone check the script for clichés?) by chirpy TV chef Ching-He Huang, whom you might remember from her likeable TV series Chinese Food Made Easy.

Neither has lived in China: Hom, who has all the mellow ease of John Malkovich, was brought up in Chicago; Huang was born in Taiwan to Chinese parents, moved to South Africa at the age of five, then to London aged 11. Both outsiders, then, with a mission to rediscover their roots. To which end, first stop Beijing, where they visited the fabled noodle masters – chefs who hand-pull 20 kinds of different noodles “like cat’s cradle”, with the casual artistry of a lifetime’s work.

After noodles, a little light wok action, with the emphasis on action: the Chinese way to prepare a stir fry was more sweaty conflagration of intense heat and flaming oil than a gentle prod of chopped veg in a saucepan. But watching Hom at work was a treat, and it was while the two were in the kitchen that the father-daughter-style dynamic of Hom and Huang proved most effective.

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We then jumped to Beijing’s street food (“Highway robbery!” declared Hom when confronted by a vendor selling dumplings at £1 a go), via discussion on the effects of the cultural revolution on Chinese food (disastrous), the rehabilitation of proper Peking duck, the opening of China to the West, rustic country cooking in the ancient village of Chuandixia (dodgy-looking cornmeal pancakes), then back to uptown Beijing, where the duo dropped in on the master of Peking duck, the chef Da Dong, to be treated to braised duck tongue and stir-fried duck heart. Top that, Heston.

“My stomach dictates who I really am,” said Hom, and to prove the point tucked into a skewered scorpion (or was it a cricket?). Aside from this, the actual cooking was happily accessible, give or take the occasional brown gloopy sauce. However, Ken Hom has made a career out of subtle, delicate dishes. Let’s hope we see some more of these in future episodes – perhaps next week, when they visit Sichuan, home of spicy peppercorns.